Re: RPG, open source, and the web

Hi Henrik,

<snip>
The JSON data that populates the grid is here (only 25 rows)

go "commachasing ;-)
</snip>


I understand that developers would sometimes want to see the JSON in a format that is more human-readable, but the client JavaScript code doesn't care. For example, XMLi allows the XML to be built in the following formats: none, simple, tabbed, pretty. But I would always use format="none" in production because it uses less bandwidth. If I need to look at a pretty version of the XML used in the production environment I'd use my IDE to "format" it for me.

I really do like the fact that you are working with RESTful services. I also like the fact that you are using the ExtJS framework to implement this. But I would imagine that the (IBM i) server code should simply expose the appropriate services to the client in an expected format and via a standard protocol. Nothing more.

Facebook and Google APIs are good examples of RESTful service architectures. Google even allows the client to specify the interface format of the responses from the services (JSON, XML, etc). Specifying JSON should be granular enough.

If the JSON doesn't look pretty enough to the JavaScript developers then I'd suggest they code to the objects and not the data. :-)

I'd go further - If I am a client-side developer and I have to go comma chasing in JSON response data passed to me from a service I'd be contacting the provider of the service to get it fixed. I don't want client-side developers fixing problems in server-side code.

I guess I'm obviously missing something crucial here...

The point of my initial post was to start a conversation about the RPG open source community and where we stand regarding the web. My code wasn't originally designed for the web. But it seems I'm going there anyway. I wanted to make sure I was aware of other projects out there that have done such things as:

1) URL Encoding
2) Base64 Encoding
3) URL Decoding
4) Base64 Decoding
5) Mixed-Mode ASCII - EBCDIC URL escape sequence translation
6) XML Building
7) XML Parsing
8) JSON Building
9) JSON Parsing
10) HTTP CGI Processing
11) SSL
12) HTTP Client calls from within the server code

etc...

I "can" do it all myself. But it seems pointless when I know Scott has built a URL Encoder and Base64 Encoder in HTTPAPI. MMAIL has a Base64 Encoder too. I know Mixed-Mode ASCII - EBCDIC conversion has been done in XMLSERVICE. I know you and Mikael have written JSON Builders. I have built a XML Builder. CGI Processing has been built into CGIDEV2, XML parsing is provided by the eXpat parser (Scott again) and the RPG op-codes from V5R4. I've not even started on SSL, etc, etc...

Seems it would be nice to bring some of them together.

Cheers

Larry Ducie